{"id":193459,"date":"2008-12-14T07:17:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-14T12:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/14\/why-japan-may-not-buy-the-jsf\/"},"modified":"2008-12-14T07:17:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-14T12:17:00","slug":"why-japan-may-not-buy-the-jsf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/14\/why-japan-may-not-buy-the-jsf\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Japan May Not Buy the JSF"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is increasingly looking like it will be impossible for Japan to have their own final assembly site for the F-35 JSF<\/a>. (paid subscription required<\/span>)<\/p>\n

Japan has been manufacturing front line fighters locally since 191956, when it started taking deliveries of the Japanese assembled F-86 Sabers, and while aircraft in service have been foreign designs (F-4EJ, F-15J), or derivatives of foreign designs (The F-2 derivative of the F-16), this is a capability that the Japanese government and military see as important (otherwise they would not have flushed all that money down the toilet on the F-2 in the 1990s).<\/p>\n

In addition to the F-35, the competitors for Japan’s next fighter requirement are the improved F-15FX and the F\/A-18E\/F from Boeing, or the Typhoon from Eurofighter:<\/p>\n

Japan\u2019s F-X fighter competition results will determine next year whether the national industry can sustain its tradition of domestic production of fast jets or instead be forced to accept a suspension and the risk of losing skills.<\/p>\n

….<\/p>\n

One Japanese official who has recently moved from the Defense Ministry to industry says that his former colleagues are inclined toward the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning to fill the F-X fighter requirement, but industry is lobbying for the Boeing F-15FX or F\/A-18E\/F Super Hornet or the Eurofighter Typhoon.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Simply put, the F-35 already has too many hard and fast contracts on work share for there to be any realistic opportunity for Japanese industry to participate.<\/p>\n

What’s more, though this article does not discuss this, the aircraft is very tightly integrated, and so it becomes very<\/span> difficult to involve local industry in upgrades.<\/p>\n

There is the possibility that Japan could go it’s own way,with either something like their ADT-X stealth demonstrator<\/a>, but the expense here would be enormous, particularly since the manufacturer would be prohibited from exporting the aircraft by the Japanese constitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is increasingly looking like it will be impossible for Japan to have their own final assembly site for the F-35 JSF. (paid subscription required) Japan has been manufacturing front line fighters locally since 191956, when it started taking deliveries of the Japanese assembled F-86 Sabers, and while aircraft in service have been foreign designs …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1007,1008,1188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aviation","category-defense-procurement","category-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}